Piercey receives some child support and Ontario Works financial assistance, but most of that goes to rent, leaving her grocery budget extra lean.

Once a month, she goes to the Lightway Church Riverdale Food Bank to help make ends meet.

“Sometimes there is little money left over for grocery shopping, once the bills are paid,” she said, adding she found out about the food bank through neighbours. “There are others out there in my situation too, so having a place like this is very important.”

The food bank offers items, including beans, crackers, pasta, rice, soup and vegetables, as well as toiletry items, such as deodorant, shampoo, soap and toothpaste to Riverdale residents in need.

Opened in February and located at 45 Barlake Ave. in Apt. 201, it serves about 35 families a month.

“We’re open every Wednesday for an hour and usually anywhere from eight to 12 families come in a week during that hour,” said Lightway Church lead pastor and Riverdale food bank coordinator Mark Vincent. “We’re more of an emergency food bank, so they only come once a month and it’s hard too, because sometimes what we give for a family doesn’t last too long because of the size of the family, but we give what we can.”

Lightway Church started the Riverdale food bank by kicking in $2,000 and through donations from congregation members. The church also received a $5,000 grant from the Hamilton Community Foundation to purchase hygiene products and $7,000 grant from the W. Garfield Weston Foundation for food items to help with its mission.

“We’re a very small church, only about 30 people on Sundays, so receiving the grants has made all the difference in the world. The money will last for a year; I don’t know if that’s recurring… we hope that maybe this funding continues or I don’t know how we could sustain this. We want to continue to help out our neighbourhood, so we’re hoping that it’s sustainable at some point,” said Vincent.

Lightway Church opened the Riverdale food bank because people in the neighbourhood can’t access the Stoney Creek Community Food Bank because they have a Hamilton address.

“For them to get food assistance, they have to go downtown, so we wanted to do something small that would at least take the edge off of some of the situations that families find themselves in,” Vincent said. “We know the Stoney Creek Community Food Bank has limited resources, so we’re just trying to do our part.”

Lightway Church’s part also includes assisting with Lake Avenue elementary school’s Breakfast/Nutrition program. The school, in partnership with Lightway Church, Creek Community Church, the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton and parent volunteers, offers the program five days a week to provide fruits, vegetables and grain or dairy products for students.

“We hold our services at the school and when we first started as a church a couple of years ago there, we started helping out with the program,” said Vincent. “The program’s great and the kids love it.”

Creek Community Church is heavily involved with the program, purchasing supplies, developing the menu and volunteering with preparation and delivery of the food to classrooms.

“Previously, we had been devoting a lot of our attention downtown through the (Hamilton) Dream Centre or Wesley Urban Ministries and places like that… and then when we developed a relationship with the school last year, we realized that the needs in Riverdale were just as extreme as the needs downtown,” said lead pastor Rick Wells. “We decided to kind of adopt that area and figured why should we be bypassing Riverdale, going downtown, when we have, right in our own community, a need that we can fill, so that’s what we did.”

Vincent admits when he first arrived in the Riverdale neighbourhood, he heard some bad things about the area.

“But since being here, I’ve just seen a lot of change and a lot of people really trying to invest in this community,” he said. “From the recreation centre to social agencies to residents, people are talking about what the problems are, what we can do to move forward and what we can do to make Riverdale a great place to live.”

For more information on the Lightway Church Riverdale Food Bank or how you can help stock the shelves, call (905) 578-5656.

* Name has been changed.